Breeders' Cup Betting Tips: Be Confident & Budget

by Jeremy Plonk

October 30, 2017

Confidence can shake anyone, from a boardroom to the batter’s box to a twitchy account finger that shakes when having to click “submit” on a bet. If your confidence is a bit shaky heading into Friday and Saturday’s Breeders’ Cup championships, don’t feel alone. You’ve got a lot of company.

Those who lack confidence will wade through Friday and Saturday playing the same exacta boxes they do on a Saturday at Santa Anita. They’ll budget $200 and bet $20 on 10 races and hope to end the day even or ahead, maybe getting lucky and catching a lobster along the way.

But those who have confidence will approach an entirely different way. They’ll attack when they feel the edge, budget accordingly for an assault on some races and show merely fandom in others. They’ll know before Friday’s first championship race approximately how much they want to bet on Saturday’s Classic at sundown.

If confidence does not inherently fit your persona, once again fear not. You’re not alone and you’ve got a lot of company. I’m here to offer an approach for those looking to foster confidence – or perhaps those who’s handicapping comes with braggadocio, but pulling the proper betting triggers always has been a problem.

Confidence pools are quite common among those playing among friends in football or team sports. If you’re not familiar, a confidence pool basically makes you rank your picks each week from least to most confidence. In other words, if you think the Steelers can’t lose this week, but are tepid at best on the Seahawks squeaking by, you’d rank Pittsburgh for the most confidence points and Seattle far down with perhaps the least amount of confidence points.

The Breeders’ Cup makes a great confidence pool exercise for horseplayers. Perhaps you do something similar in your mind’s eye and have that approach anyway. But maybe you’ve never considered it or never put it to paper to see how it really looks. When there are 13 title races and undercards of intrigue, ranking your betting attack in a confidence pool approach can be a big boon to strategy.

First things first, positively DO NOT consider Friday and Saturday as separate entities. You don’t look at a Thursday, Sunday or Monday night NFL pick any differently in terms of budgeting or ranking in a confidence pool. You wouldn’t bet any more on a team if they played on Thursday or Sunday; you’d weigh the match-up and go after it as you see fit.

First, rank the Breeders’ Cup races 1-13 with 1 being your least confident handicapping picks and 13 being the most confident. Once you have the list of 13, try to draw a line in natural breaks of opinion. If there are 2-3 races you feel really confident about, then draw a line under the 2nd or 3rd one and show yourself where you go from really confident, to less, and less. If there are 8 races in which you are totally not confident, put the line above the highest of those and you’ll notice a glaring weakness of opinion in races you probably should not be betting very much upon at all.

Second, rank the Breeders’ Cup races 1-13 for where you think the value and payoffs will come from with 1 being the least valuable and 13 being the one with the best potential returns. How do you determine this? Check the free Xpressbet Breeders’ Cup Wager Guide and compare average payoffs, winning favorites’ percentages, etc. Also consider field size (bigger equals more value nearly without fail) and the strength of this year’s favorite in your opinion.

Finally, add up the confidence points in your handicapping with the value points you’ve tried to predict in the races. The races that have the highest totals when adding these two numbers together should be the ones in which you are ready to budget more of your bankroll toward. They combine confidence and value, the two keys on when to dive in for a horseplayer.

Now that you know which races are strongest in your mind and potential payouts, you can rank them 1-13 in how much you should budget. Remember, Friday and Saturday are irrelevant to the budget. I would recommend you spend about 60% of your budget for the weekend on the top two or three plays.

For a $500 weekend budget, that means $300 to your top 2-3 plays. The $500 player then has $200 left for the remaining 10-11 Breeders’ Cup races and should spend $150 of that on the next line of 2-3 best plays and leave the final 10% ($50) for light swimming in the bottom races or skip them altogether if you have discipline.

For a $100 budget player, that’s about $60 on your top 2-3 plays. This leaves about $30 to spend on the next line of 2-3 best plays and $10 to play around some action bets on a handful of the remaining races in which you lack any strong opinions.

You May Also Like

10.23.2017

Handicapping the horse races, by and large, is an individual exercise. You crack open the past performances of your choice and get to work. That works well most any day when 8-10 races of somewhat familiar horses of varying levels of obvious ability match up.
But when that number of races balloons to 13 and average field sizes are double-digits and not 7-8, the numbers can quickly overwhelm a singular handicapper. Your challenge trying to study the Breeders’ Cup races strictly on your own can snowball quickly out of control. No matter how seasoned you think you are, or how stubborn, perhaps your best admission for Breeders’ Cup handicapping is to realize your limitations.
Maybe you know the Californians like the back of your hand, or the New Yorkers. Great, you’ve got about a quarter of the Breeders’ Cup handicapping mountain climbed. Knowing a quarter of 150 horses won’t even get you a confident exacta box, much less the pick four, five or six you dream of taking down. You see, at the Breeders’ Cup the big difference in handicapping isn’t the number of races, but rather the number of actually bettable horses. Toss-outs are few. Upsets are historically frequent and must be worked into your train of thought. Combine those factors and it means you must work hard on each and every horse.
That’s an impossible singular task.
And that’s why one of my big recommendations as you begin studying for this year’s Breeders’ Cup is to join a team. If you have a few handicapping friends, work together and compare notes or assignments. Divvy up the research with perhaps individuals coming to the group with an assessment of a particular region or particular handicapping tool (i.e. pedigrees, key trainer stats, race replay notes).
If you’re not one to hang out with other handicappers, use the resources available out there to build your team. Follow what’s said on Twitter and take advantage and notes of things that could be relevant on individual horses, races or situations. Watch the fantastic free programming on XBTV.com and gather what you can from the multiple sets of eyes and individual expertise of so many. Download the free Xpressbet Breeders’ Cup Wager Guide beginning this Friday and put those top analysts in your corner, if not just for the boatload of free stats and trends stuffing its pages.
And perhaps you want to go the commercial route and purchase some handicapping aids for the Breeders’ Cup that you’d never consider on a daily routine. Even as someone who does this full-time, I have people in the game I respect and when they like a horse that I haven’t considered, it gives me fuel to take a second look and make sure I know exactly why I don’t like that horse. Sometimes a second look and second opinion pays off when a trusted source turns you back onto something you missed.
Team up this Breeders’ Cup any way you know how.
There’s so much out there to do, but also so much out there in which you can take and apply to help the process!

11.6.2017

So what did I learn from the Breeders’ Cup and its 34th edition this past weekend at Del Mar? Here are my most important takeaways.
THE UNSPOKEN IMPACT
The biggest impact on BC17 wasn’t seen anywhere, but there’s no doubt in my mind it was felt for months. Out of competition random testing completely overhauled the prep process in terms of how horses were treated and how they were campaigned. We didn’t suddenly see the entire month of October – and a lot of September showcases, too – basically skated around because trainers abruptly found a new way to prepare. Horses could not be administered synthetic means of recovery following races this year and safely be assured they would not be tested out of competition. This meant hay, oats, water and…most importantly…time in the recovery process.
It’s impossible to know exactly which horses and horsemen that the new testing procedures impacted most, but I would start with the ones who didn’t race for several months and subsequently turned in clunkers. And what about the nearly non-existence of some otherwise powerful BC barns? This is not to say anyone did anything illegal or against the rules prior to this year’s rule changes. But it was a different calendar this year and I can only finger one reason for it. In the year 1 AM (After-Masochistic), things were quite different.
STOP THE REGIONAL WHINE
Once again the west coast proved a plenty-useful place for horses of other regions to showcase their skills. The idea that the east wins in the east and the west wins in the west is so “past-decades” in Breeders’ Cup history. This isn’t 2003 and Richard Mandella owning the day at Santa Anita, or Rick Dutrow besting everyone at Belmont.
Friday’s four Breeders’ Cup winners were based in New York, Kentucky, California and Ireland. On Saturday, Gun Runner beat everything Bob Baffert could throw at him in an away game; New York swept both 2YO races; Californians won 3 of the 4 races for fast horses – the Dirt Mile, Sprint and Turf Sprint – with NY taking the F&M Sprint. The Woodbine Mile with an American horse once again delivered in the Mile, while the Europeans won the F&M Turf and Turf. I’m not sure you could draw up a more sensible and fair set of regional results than this. When we go back to Churchill next year and (hopefully) Laurel after that, I’m certain the Californians will be equally fine on the road as the rest of the world was in their house.
IT’S STILL A PRIZE-MONEY SPORT
Professional ballplayers ply their trade for a salary, but this game of horse racing still remains a prize-money endeavor. When jockey Joel Rosario was sacked at the last minute and replaced on Forever Unbridled for the Distaff in favor of John Velazquez, we got a stiff reminder of that. True, the California stewards ruled that Rosario was still entitled to mount fees and prize money because of owner Chuck Fipke’s eleventh-hour change of call. But you didn’t exactly see John Velazquez and his team turn down the ride at the entry box in the name of what’s right, either. This is not to place blame on any side, but rather to show that the spin in horse racing that owners, trainers and jockeys constantly deal with is terribly thin ice.
If you want to know why the rules are twisted and the edges taken, think how quickly you can lose a ride in a $2 million race or how quickly a van can pull up and send the best horse in your barn to your rival’s shedrow. Look no further than the Forever Unbridled-Abel Tasman exacta in the Distaff and put yourself in the shoes of Joel Rosario and Simon Callaghan. This is a hard enough game to win as it is.
SCRIPTS ARE FOR HOLLYWOOD
Zenyatta lost her career finale in the 2010 Classic in a race that anyone with a heart felt she was destined to win, and therefore failed to retire unbeaten for the ages. Yes, these races are real … and we got another novel (pun intended) reminder this year that storybook endings aren’t scripted at the Breeders’ Cup. For every Personal Ensign or Beholder miracle, there are a handful of opposite outcomes that were equally sought by the public.
This year, Arrogate never got his groove back; Bolt d’Oro didn’t prove to be a 3-5 shot for next year’s Kentucky Derby trail; Lady Aurelia didn’t unite the world in Turf Sprint harmony; and Lady Eli lost to twice as many horses in her Filly & Mare Turf finale (6) than she had in her entire 13-race career prior (3).
THE SUMMATION
All in all, it was tremendous theater, even better racing, and the ultimate in wagering at this year’s Breeders’ Cup. The joy and pain of picking 4 winners on top – Mendelssohn ($11.60), Caledonia Road ($36.60), World Approval ($7.40) and Talismanic ($30.20) – but failing to land a pick four on either day, just goes to show how much we must appreciate our major financial successes when they do come.
Here’s hoping you thoroughly enjoyed the best of Thoroughbred racing’s championship weekend.